“Dad, I still don’t want to go. I just have this feeling that something horrible is going to happen.”
My son was invited to go skiing with a couple of his buddies.
He was worried about two things—
They were better skiers than him. He didn’t want to hold them up.
And for the first time, no other adults would be there.
My son and his friends are in sixth grade. I wanted him to go. And I was worried about him, and everything that could go wrong. The same things that he had talked about the night before, and now this morning.
But the time had come to choose.
I saw in that moment that I needed to choose, too. We both were deciding if I would protect him, or if he would continue to grow.
Here’s a picture of the boys at the base of the mountain. My son is on the left. He looks a little tentative to me. (And I was still tentative when I saw it.)
But he did it. And I asked him, what was it that made him decide to do it? Even though he was afraid?
“I just decided it would be fun, Dad.”
How often do we hear the stories in our heads about everything that could go wrong? Yet there is so much joy on the other side of that fear.
If only we can feel the fear and do it anyway.
Because we know it will be fun.